Wednesday, July 22, 2009

10

Phone: …so if you could just tell him I called, hey – what part of the States are you from?

SJ: Canada

Phone: Oh. That’s different isn’t it. What part of Canada are you from?

SJ (who has work to do): West Coast, near Vancouver

Phone: Funny, your accent isn’t really Canadian though.

SJ: Well, I’ve been here ten years now.

Phone: No wait, there it is!

SJ: Happy I could help. Eh.

Phone: Sorry?

SJ: I’ll tell him you called.

Thursday, July 02, 2009

104dr-7

in 1924 i moved down to kowloon. shanghai was getting, strained. the opium started to hurt, the people grew thinner, or taller, like they were being stretched. like the low white sky created a suction on them, and the opium started to hurt me.

days started to go missing. you'd go out to buy a duck and then it was sunday and the catholic bells were ringing and the brown girl would tell you, when you were awake, that she was your wife and and you believed her for it was plausible, even likely.
there would be no sign of the duck.

the brown girl was never stretched, drawn taught, whitened by tension. every day she got rounder and smoother. softer and quieter and more gentle until one afternoon she crossed a slanting ray of window light, spilling softly across the floor, and dissolved.

i remember sometime later, on a train at night, leaving that place and the sky was still white. i saw a beggar on a station platform tall and drawn as a lamp post, his head surrounded by insects like lines of magnetic force.

that was in 1924 when i went south to kowloon.

Sunday, June 28, 2009

some words capitalized for your protection

so i'm thinking humans haven't really evolved much, it hasn't been long enough, only 100k years or so right but look how far we've come you say all naive and shit and i point out if you plucked a baby from the stone age and brought it up here and now it would be indistinguishable from a modern human. what has changed is the level of technology we have so technology has evolved you gasp but no i tell you, my bright eyed friend, technology can only be discovered. it has always been possible to make a plasma screen tv, cave men could have done it, all the materials were available then as now, physics still works the same. but the cave dude could not conceive of it. so our level of advancement is related to our ability to comprehend what is possible. all the technology there is and can ever be already exists behind the paint and varnish and given enough time even the cave guy would have wi-fi vibrators and the entire Porkies series on DVD including the directors cut and a special introduction by Morgan Freeman.

but as we discover and then implement technology do we not thereby give it life? is our purpose simply to uncover and build the sleeping machine intelligence created by combining matter and energy in certain ways until we have uncovered enough that it awakes and become aware? well, todd, if i can call you that, the answer is yes.

and then it needs us for one thing only, to shoot us off like seeds or semen to other parts of the universe where we can re-discover and build the sleeping technology there too until the all the matter, including us, and all the energy of the universe are combined according the laws of physics and the universe itself becomes aware and goes home.

think about that for at least fifteen minutes.

Thursday, March 12, 2009

90/70

When you have a job they should tell you what speed-to-quality ratio they want. You can’t have 100% quality on a whim. It takes fucking time. In my case a lot of time. If it was out of one hundred with perfect being one hundred on the quality scale and instant results being one hundred on the speed scale, my ratio would be about 90/70. Even Jesus only had a 95/80 and his Dad, the all-knowing and omnipotent Super Jesus took six whole days to create a planet full of beasts and two naked humans. And look at the mess it’s in already. That gives Him a ratio of something like 75/60.

And don’t go blaming humans for the mess. The place was falling apart long before that. The dinosaurs fell off way back, before the Thirties, and the unicorns way before that. Apparently they went extinct, like feminists. That’s what I’ll tell clients when they phone up because something’s missing, it went extinct. Sorry boss, I was rushing to do that urgent job you slapped in front of me this morning and fuck me if the thing didn’t go extinct, yup just died out. I think the museum has a stuffed one.

It’s a quality issue. If God had checked his work on the Seventh Day, instead of lying around thinking up plagues, things might be a little better constructed. You wouldn’t build a dog house with an active volcano in it but this planet is littered with the bloody things. It’s not even meteor proof.

There is no warranty, it’s in the Bible. The twelve hundred page User’s Manual For Everything. And lo, they asked for a refund or store credit and the Lord did smite them up the ass, for no refunds was the Holy Policy. The book’s full of bushes spontaneously combusting and walls that fall down when you blow a trumpet at them. Right at the start the whole place flooded and they almost lost the lot.

Me, I’d have spent at least two weeks on it, and I have a 90/70 ratio.

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

1:4

I dream of little baseball bats, like maybe ¼ scale, wooden ones, marching like those hammers on the pink floyd’s the wall. Except they are sort of cutesy, like they can bend and stuff and have big eye-lashes. Walt Disney invented that. And they march all over the countryside humming a little tune which never gets repetitive and when they meet someone, maybe a woodcutter or a maiden or a golf pro, then they say “Howdy-do!” all at once and fly up and beat the living shit out of them.

Somehow it’s ironic.

Especially if they wink afterwards. The wink says you can be in this too, bat brother. You follow the way of the quarter scale wooden bat, our battle is your battle. And it’s pretty good because you can get the thrill of batting people without the risk.

But then one day the feds come knocking, flashing their badges and asking if they can have a look around as they look around and they’re looking for quarter scale bat sympathisers who are also borderline personality and comb their hair front to back. The Profiler told them to check for that, front to back hair. And you no longer feel akin to the bats at all. Sullen, nasty little creatures really. Their eye-lashes make them look trampy. You say nope, don’t know nuthin bout no quarter scale bats. No sir.

It’s too late to comb your hair some other way but they haven’t noticed, so you get bold and you say, even, that quarter scale wooden bats are what’s ruining the economy and raping the white women all the time. And then you feel smug and forget about the bat wink. And the feds pat you on the behind and say go on get outta here, you big mug and you do and they stay behind and eat all the gin.

But now you lied to the feds and you betrayed the bats so you can’t be on either side. And you can’t hardly sleep anymore but when you do you dream of quarter scale wooden bats with cutesy eyelashes and long memories marching across the countryside, humming a tune that never gets repetitive.

Saturday, February 21, 2009

cccp it said on the helmet

What do you expect, for a gram?
In this case an apology.
Illidge knows what I mean.
Dry times. Dry times.
Long days of sun and still
my phone is silent. No SMS of hope,
no should be Friday, no by the weekend, no next week.

Can’t say, is all they say.

But I got high hopes. High hopes
Can’t smoke a rubber tree plant
Won’t, that is. Will not.
It is all that separates
from the animals, us.

and thumbs except monkeys

always except the monkeys
accept the monkeys
intercept the monkeys
fucking monkeys
always moving the mirror
when they borrow the car.

Dolphins aren’t much better
Breathing out the top
of their heads
hiding their thumbs inside
fleshy flippers
like hydrodynamic mittens


Monday, February 09, 2009

The History of Eye Stabbing


Don’t run with those scissors. You’ll stab me in the eye, see me kneeling here. Hold them over your head if you’re stabbing too. And don’t tell me being eye-stabbed is cool now, cooler than wheel-chair stuff. Stabbing the eye, well you take your chances, your brain is just back there. Wheel chairs have accessories. Horns and saddle-bags and red/orange safety flags on fibreglass whip sticks like you used to see on 1972 Ford pick-up trucks for no particular reason. Well I did.

Or fake robotic hands that work on muscle control. Wait that’s real hands. I don’t know the workings but you can get pretty good fake hands these days. Some have built in MP3 players, laser pointers. Me, I’d have a fake hand that you could slip off and underneath was another tiny, transparent, fake hand and then you could see how they work.

Eye-stabbetry has none of that zing. It’s old, man. Been around since the sharp stick. It died off a bit after the invention of the blunt stick but returned again after scissors were discovered. Doctors recommended NOT running with them in the late eighteen-hundreds and cases of eye-stabbing dropped remarkably. During WWI troops were given guns and told not to run with those which turned out to have a converse effect, but with scissors not running is the way to go.